Activating Verbs from Typical Agents, Patients, Instruments, and Locations via Event Schemas

Verbs are a major component of theories of language processing, partly because they exhibit systematic restrictions on their arguments. However, verbs follow their arguments in many constructions (particularly in verb-final languages), making it inefficient to defer processing until the verb. Computational modeling suggests that during sentence processing, nouns may activate information about subsequent lexical items, including verbs. We investigated this prediction using short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, the time between the onsets of the prime and target) priming. Robust priming obtained when verbs were named aloud following typical agents (nun praying), patients (dice rolled), instruments (shovel digging), and locations (arena skating). This research is the first to investigate systematically the priming of verbs from nouns. It suggests that event memory is organized so that entities and objects activate the class of events in which they typically play a role (Lancaster & Barsalou, 1997). These computations may be an important component of expectancy generation in sentence processing.